Climate Models and the case for Climate Change

[Riverwind]

Climate alarmists claim that the science for catastrophic climate change indisputable and accepted by the overwhelming majority of the scientific community. What they don't know or realize is that many people in the scientific community have formed their opinion based on the assumption that the relatively small number of climate modellers have done their job right and that the climate models provide useful predictions of the future.

This recent peer reviewed paper carefully compared the model output to the real world and came to the conclusions that:

The results show that models perform poorly, even at a climatic (30-year) scale. Thus local model projections cannot be credible, whereas a common argument that models can perform better at larger spatial scales is unsupported.

Roger Peilke Sr, a climate scientist who believes that man is changing the climate, reviewed the paper here and made this comment:

A fundamental and societally relevant conclusion from this study is that the use of the IPCC model predictions as a basis for policy making is invalid and seriously misleading.

This paper reinforces the conclusions of this article published in Skeptic magazine (not a traditional peer reviewed paper but it explains some of the issues in a way that a layperson is more likely to understand).

Now I do agree that we know enough about CO2 to be concerned and that the precautionary principal can be used to justify some public policy changes. However, I feel the public debate has been poisoned by activists who push for radical, expensive and risky changes based on the premise that the climate models are likely to be correct. I think such rhetoric is unjustified and self-defeating and that we need to have a political conversation on CO2 that takes into account how little we really know.

Edited July 31, 2008 by Riverwind